LineNow vs Stocky for Shopify Operators
Stocky is the inventory app Shopify ships with POS Pro. LineNow is a procurement and inventory platform for SMBs. Where each fits, where each stops working, and how to choose.Important: Shopify has announced that Stocky is being discontinued on August 31, 2026. If you currently use Stocky for purchase orders, stocktakes, supplier ordering, or Shopify POS inventory workflows, you need a replacement before that date.
The replacement question is not only "which app looks most like Stocky?" It is whether you want another inventory app, or whether this is the right moment to upgrade to a closed-loop procurement platform.
Stocky helped Shopify POS operators create POs and manage inventory. LineNow handles the larger buying loop: inventory recommendations, purchase orders, supplier communication, AI on supplier replies, receiving, inventory updates, and accounting handoff. If Stocky was the PO-and-inventory layer, LineNow is the system that keeps working after the PO is sent.
TL;DR
| Stocky | LineNow | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Discontinued Aug 31, 2026 | Active and growing |
| Closed-loop control (no human retyping between events) | No | Yes — order → send → reply parsed → received → inventory → next recommendation |
| Layer 1 AI: agentic supplier-reply monitoring | No | Yes — auto-updates status, items, prices, ETAs, substitutions, invoice IDs |
| Layer 2 AI: structured-data insights chatbot + saved reports | No | Yes |
| Team collaboration on supplier email threads inside the system | No | Yes |
| Statistical demand forecasting (SBA, decay-aware) | Basic suggestions | Yes — published operations-research stack |
| Recipe / BOM costing | No | Yes |
| Multi-POS (not just Shopify) | Shopify only | Shopify, Square, Toast, Faire, Clover |
| Send POs via email, WhatsApp, EDI, supplier portal | Email PDF only | All four — native, per-supplier preference |
| Bills push to QuickBooks/Xero with COGS classification | Limited | Yes |
| Embedded PO payments | No | Yes (via Stripe Connect) |
| Capital / cash-flow forecasting | No | Yes (10 months rolling) |
| Multi-vertical (retail + dropship + restaurant + manufacturer) | Retail (POS Pro) only | All four in one account |
| Pricing | Bundled with POS Pro ($89/mo/loc) | $50/mo flat, every feature, 90-day free trial |
Migrating from Stocky
Operators who used Stocky for inventory tracking, PO generation, and stocktake workflows can replace all of it with LineNow:
- Inventory tracking — Real-time POS sync, statistical PAR with decay handling, days-of-stock projections, automated alerts. Equivalent to or deeper than Stocky's inventory layer.
- PO generation — One-click POs from inventory recommendations, sent through whichever channel each supplier prefers.
- Stocktake / counts — Receive workflow with substitution handling, full audit trail.
- Multi-location — One LineNow account, all locations, $50/month flat. No per-location pricing.
Stocky users typically migrate in under a week. The Shopify catalog imports automatically; supplier records can be brought in from existing POs or QuickBooks; and the recommendation engine starts producing useful output as soon as 30 days of POS sales are visible.
What Stocky was missing — and LineNow has
The reason Shopify is sunsetting Stocky is structural: it was a one-way PO generator with no closing of the loop. After Stocky emailed a PDF, the supplier's reply landed in your inbox, you read and re-typed the changes, and Stocky was unaware of any of it. The system rotted into a glorified PDF maker within months for any operator with more than a handful of suppliers.
LineNow is the opposite: a closed-loop control system. Once a PO leaves the system, an AI agent watches every channel a supplier might reply through — Gmail, Microsoft 365, forwarded mailboxes, WhatsApp Business, EDI, web portals — and updates the order automatically. Status, line items, prices, ETAs, substitutions, confirmation IDs, invoice IDs, shipping info — all parsed and applied without you re-typing.
This is the Layer 1 AI capability most analogous to Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Supplier Communications Agent: software that reads supplier communication and turns it into order state. LineNow includes that supplier-reply workflow in the $50/month subscription for SMBs.
On top of that clean ledger sits Layer 2 AI: a conversational chatbot that answers natural-language questions about your business, generates custom reports, and can draft a PO from a high-level prompt for your review. Stocky had nothing equivalent.
The team collaboration moat
LineNow ingests every supplier email into the system, attached to the order it concerns. The communication tab on each PO is a single chronological view of: outbound system actions, inbound supplier emails (parsed and visible), WhatsApp messages, EDI documents, and team comments. Multiple people can reply to the same supplier thread without sharing an inbox. Every reply is attributed; every system action is logged.
This is the differentiator most operators don't realize they need until they have it. Stocky never offered it.
Forecasting depth Stocky never had
Stocky's stock-suggestion logic was a sell-through-rate heuristic. LineNow uses the SBC framework to classify demand into smooth, intermittent, erratic, or lumpy, and applies the Syntetos–Boylan Approximation (Syntetos & Boylan, 2005) for non-smooth items. Decay-aware PAR for perishables. Statistical safety stock with z-scores by service level. The same operations-research methods that run Walmart's distribution centers, deployed to an SMB.
Pricing
Stocky required Shopify POS Pro ($89/mo per location). A 4-location operator paid $356/month before the platform was discontinued.
LineNow: $50/month flat, all locations, every feature, 90-day free trial.
When to migrate
Now. Stocky's deprecation date is approaching, and the longer you wait, the more compressed your migration window becomes. LineNow's 90-day free trial gives you 3 months to run in parallel before any subscription cost — long enough to retire Stocky entirely on your own timeline.
The honest call
LineNow is not the cheap-and-cheerful Stocky replacement. It is a structurally larger system than Stocky ever was: closed-loop control, two layers of AI, team collaboration on supplier emails, native multi-channel communication, statistical replenishment with published methodology, multi-vertical architecture. Replacing Stocky with LineNow isn't a downgrade. It's a category jump.